Free A Box of Nothing by Peter Dickinson

yellow foot.
    He ran over and gazed down. It was big enough to help him fight the second rat if it wasn’t too wounded, but when he got near he saw it was really dying. He stood and gazed down at it and the yellow unreadable eye stared back. If only he could do something.
    Mop up the blood? No use. Get it a drink of the foul black water? Nothing to carry it in. Better leave it and find somewhere Perhaps the rat would forget about him once it had found the gull.
    James had actually turned away when he remembered his box of nothing. It probably wouldn’t do any good, but it had helped when the computer had gone mad. And it couldn’t do any harm, not if the gull was dying.
    He pulled it out of his inside pocket and placed it against the largest patch of blood. His idea, if you could call it that, was that it might somehow unbullet the bullet inside the wound.
    The gull stirred at the touch. Then, quick as a blink, it shrank. One moment there’d been a huge, wounded bird lying on its side, and the next there was an ordinary seaside gull struggling to its feet. It strutted a couple of steps and rattled its feathers into place, sending a spatter of little bright things onto the ground. Then it gave James a gull’s typical haughty one-eyed stare, stretched its wings, and flew off.
    James put the box back into his pocket as he watched it go, then picked up one of the bright things that had fallen out of its feathers. It was a scrap of silver paper … a sweet wrapping or something … roughly twisted into the shape of a bullet. He was still looking at it and wondering, when something squeaked sharply behind him.
    He turned. A rat airman was standing there, only a few feet away. It was pointing a huge revolver straight at James’s head.
    A little later James was walking along a narrow track, with the rat he had stunned in front of him and the other rat, the one with the revolver, behind. Far away to his right he could see the airship, like a coloured speck in the sky, being towed by several gulls. It was too small for him to see whether the Burra had mended itself and got the basket straight, but anyway none of the gulls had come to look for him, or for their fallen comrade.
    The rats marched on all fours. The one behind carried the revolver, cocked, in its teeth. Before they’d started it had shown James how quickly it could get into the firing position. Still, James kept thinking that he ought to be able to escape by using his box, somehow getting close enough to touch a rat and turn it back into an ordinary animal. If only there weren’t two of them. But the one in front had a revolver in its belt, and it would have time to draw and fire while James was dealing with the one behind. And, anyway, he couldn’t be sure whether the box would work on rats. It had on the gull, but then the gull had been dying. Suppose a rat shot at him while he was carrying the box. Would the bullet turn into a bit of silver paper before it had hit him? Or after? If only he could be sure how the box worked.
    He was still trying to get up the nerve to do something when they met the patrol. Or perhaps it was a search party, because four of them were carrying stretchers. The rest were rat soldiers. They all became very excited when they met. The rat officer rubbed whiskers with the pilot and gunner and then the whole group gathered in a chattering ring around James. The officer pranced up and squeaked at him. James shook his head. The officer pulled out a pistol and began to jump up and down, which seemed to be the rats’ habit when they were angry. James became frightened, but at last the officer must have grasped that he couldn’t understand rat language. It stopped jumping around and squeaked orders to the others. They all marched down the track.
    By the time they reached the railroad line James was extremely tired. The rats let him sit down while they got a meal ready. It was just water with a soapy taste